Benefits of a Side Project

Just recently I started a side project with some friends of mine. Even though I thought it would be fun I needed to justify it to both my family and my self. Here are the reasons that I came up with for it being a good idea.

Learn New Technology - I am doing the project in groovy and grails and although these are not new to me, I have not been able to put the time into them that I would like. Also when you have to tackle real problems it can really boost your learning on the platform.

Practice what you Preach - On my "Paid" projects I am always telling the people I work with alternate approaches and processes that we could use to improve our productivity. The side project gives me a chance to put my money where my mouth is. I will be able to work on Acceptance Test Driven Development, Kanban, UX design, Personnas, Story Maps and other things that I mention but am not allowed to use in my day to day work. This way I can refine what I say and come up with some real world examples of why and how they work.

New Tools - This new project is allowing me to try some tools I don't use at my current project. Some of these are:

• Developing on my Mac Book Pro
• Setting up and using a Linux Server
• Using AgileZen as a story/kanban board for a distributed team
• Easy-B for ATDD
• WebDriver2/Selenium for front-end testing
• Hudson for my CI server

Experimentation - One of the big experiments I want to try on this project are functional branching and Continuous Deployment. These are things I have been trying to get worked into my current environment but there are just to many things I haven't wrapped my head around to be able to pitch it to a large scale corporate environment.

Just Fun - The last item is that I just think it would be fun to work with these tools and processes and people on this application. Plus when it is all said and done, I will hopefully have a better tool to enter information about my workouts in, and be able to get some good reporting on my progress. I also hope that I will be able use this application as a back-end for an iPhone and/or an Android front-end also.

Well that is my story of why I signed up for this and I am sticking to it. Hopefully later on I will be able to write some good posts about some of the tools I worked with here and some good lessons learned.